KMCRIC

Join us for a fast-paced, interdisciplinary fueled two days of learning, sharing and connection as we engage with one another, across disciplines, practices and professions to transform the end of life into a person-centered experience.

This inclusive interdisciplinary conference explores dying and death and the ways culture impacts care for the dying, the overall experience of dying, and how the dead are remembered. Culture not only presents and portrays ideas about “a good death” and norms that seek to achieve it, culture also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which meaning about death is communicated and understood. Sadly, too, culture sometimes facilitates death through violence.

Given the location of this year’s conference, a central theme in our proceedings (augmenting those listed below) will involve tracing on-going and profound shifts in contemporary attitudes toward death. Hospices or almshouses (in Dutch: Godshuizen) are charitable housing that were usually built for needy or elderly people. The initiative often came from crafts organisations or rich individuals ordered their establishment. In Bruges these houses already start to appear in the 14th century. Generally they consist of groups of small, soberly furnished houses that are gathered around an inner courtyard. The houses are usually not more than one story high. Luckily some 40 of those complexes still survive in Bruges today.  Most of them still serve a social purpose (as housing for elderly, poor, disabled people,…). Our conference explores these connections, and those between contemporary technologies, social media hubs, and current health care delivery systems that impact current end-of-life issues and decisions, including the experience of bereavement and grief, and particularly how patients, staff, and survivors intersect amidst newly emerging care settings.